If you were to read widely in contemporary political theory and activist literature, you might come away thinking that the limits of political action are set by what is thinkable, by conceptual modes and models. To be sure, epistemes and structures of perception and counterperception matter a great deal, and conceptual work and material structures are mutually embedded within one another. But as a matter of fact, the limits of political action are set by what is possible within the zones created by infrastructure.
J. Mohorčich (2022). “People die in six ways and each is politics: Infrastructure and the possible.” Contemporary Political Theory 21(2): 175–197 (accessed online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8414030/; my bold)
Below are seven more examples of issues reframed through the lens of critical infrastructures.
1. Thinking infrastructurally about Nimbyism
I
They believe that climate change is happening but don’t want those wind-farms off their coastline. Those driving electric cars are opposed by those demanding no more cars, period. Those who demand more renewable energy here are among those opposing construction of new electric transmission lines from renewables there.
The commonplace is to insist tradeoffs are involved. But tradeoffs aren’t the only or even priority starting point.
II
How so? Start with an observation in an online New York Times,
While China is the world’s biggest adopter of clean energy, it also remains the world’s biggest user of fossil fuels, particularly coal. “We have to hold these two things, which can seem contradictory, in our heads at the same time,” [another Times correspondent] said. “China is pulling the world in two directions.”
This may not be a contradiction so much as a transition.
German Lopez in The New York Time’s online Morning, August 14 2023
That is: What if the above NIMBYisms are not contradictions so much as part of transitions underway? What if the oppositions aren’t stalemates but are already leading to something different?
III
One such reinterpretation involves the transfer of renewable energy between and across different electricity grids in the US.
While there is a pressing need for new transmission lines, that new construction would add to a base of inter-regional electricity transmission, including for clean energy. True, how much of that transitioning to renewables is going on is hard to document. True, the regional grids are fragmented and true, more renewable energy is needed because the grid itself is vital to other critical infrastructures, like water and telecommunications, relying on it.
IV
If so, then what?
Take a case where city residents objecting to wind-farms off their coastline are served by a grid not inter-regionally connected to clean energy sources. One response to this Nimbyism would be to hike up the electricity rates of city residents: not just because they are forgoing clean energy but also because their rates for the interconnected water, cellphone and transportation reinforce that choice to forego.
Transitioning to clean energy in my back-yard is already in the front-yard of inter-regional energy infrastructures.
2. Thinking infrastructurally about migration
I
Thinking infrastructurally about migrants typically short-cuts to the stresses and strains they bode for a site’s infrastructures, i.e., the added demands they impose on water supplies, transportation, energy, healthcare and the social protection systems, be that “site” a city, region or nation.
Attempts at itemizing the benefit side of having migrants–by virtue of added economic growth and tax revenues–look more and more feeble these days in the face of calls for degrowth and populist pressures against more government.
Shift this frame of reference to infrastructures, however, and matters look different.
II
Historically, diasporic immigrations worldwide–e.g., the transoceanic slave trades–have had their own irreversible impacts. One such irreversibility has been that immigrants and infrastructures have developed together, with “worldwide” as indeed the appropriate level and unit of analysis.
Rather than migrants as a priori stressors on existing infrastructures, the more realistic point of departure is the evolution of: water supplies with respect to migrants, energy supplies with respect to migrants, telecommunications with respect to migrants, and so on. Indeed, infrastructures and (im)migrants render each other visible and tangible–unavoidably really-existing for themselves and the rest of us–in ways that the noticeably immaterial labor of speechifying anti-immigrant politicians and pro-immigrant advocates does not.
III
So what?
In reality, pro- and anti-immigration policies have rarely been articulated in practical terms when it comes to shifts in the many different configurations of interconnected critical infrastructures, worldwide or not.
The idealized concatenation of sequential and reciprocal interconnectivity–migrants leave home and arrive at their destination, and once there, interact with others–has been (if it weren’t always) much more complicated. Mediated interconnectivities of traffickers and remittances along with pooled interconnectivities (think: EU directives on border management) have complicated matters even more.
For example, the focus on shifting interconnectivities takes on increasing importance in the digitalization of border management, not least of which in the operation of Frontex, the EU’s primary agency in this area. It is argued that, via digital technologies (including AI), national borders are being securitized and militarized. Surveillance is broadened and changing majorly. “Europe has long been implementing border and migratory policies that focus on externalising European borders as far south as Senegal or as far east as Azerbaijan” records the same report (https://datajusticeproject.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2023/08/Risking-Lives-report.pdf). Another report finds:
The removal of rescue boats and the increase of the utilization of drones is used by Frontex to detect and prevent migratory flows at an early stage, as migrant vessels are recognized in pre-frontier areas. In fact, the Frontex Situation Centre is a unit in charge of monitoring the external borders and the pre-frontier areas of the EU (European Parliament, 2018). The investment in drones has increased considerably in parallel with the deterrence of external rescue operations and the withdrawal of some naval missions in the Mediterranean, as it happened in the case of the Operation Sophia. Therefore, vessels that are capable of helping migrants and asylum seekers are replaced by drones that can only observe. In consequence, the agency has not the obligation to intervene neither rescue them.
https://centredelas.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WP_DronesFrontex_ENG.pdf
And yet, the complexity remains when the focus is on digital interconnectivities. A third report concludes:
Overall, the wide range of applications for new technologies implies that each one should be investigated independently, taking into consideration its development context and the unique requirements of the stakeholders who develop and use them. This report, therefore, debunks a totalising, black-and-white perception of the uses of new technologies. New technologies can be used for various purposes ranging from including migrants’ and refugees’ preferences in their settlement processes (as in the case of some preference matching tools) to profiling them through risk assessments or monitoring them through invasive tools such as electronic monitoring. While the former can benefit migrants by having a say in their migration and settlement trajectory, the latter can have extremely harmful impacts on them. It is, therefore, crucial to examine each use of new technology in its own right, considering its design and implementation processes and their legal and social impacts.
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/automating-immigration-and-asylum-uses-new-technologies-migration-and-asylum-governance-europe
Indeed, digital surveillance and recognition systems are very much a mixed bag of shifting pros and cons at the case level (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517211006744).
Yes, these cases of shifts in interconnectivity can well be inter-related, but by definition they cannot be reduced to one and the same case (there are, after all, separate nodes in even the most tightly -coupled network.)
3. Thinking infrastructurally “system robustness” from the perspective of repair and maintenance of large socio-technical systems
The last thing many people think is that infrastructures are fragile. If anything, they are massive structures, where “heavy” and “sturdy” come to mind. But the fact that they not only fail in systemwide disasters, but that they also require routine (and nonroutine) maintenance and repair as they depreciate, requires us to take the fragility features also seriously.
Fortunately, there are those who write on infrastructure fragility from a broadly socio-cultural perspective rather than the socio-technical one with which I am familiar:
For all of their impressive heaviness, infrastructures are, at the end of the day, often remarkably light and fragile creatures—one or two missed inspections, suspect data points, or broken connectors from disaster. That spectacular failure is not continually engulfing the systems around us is a function of repair: the ongoing work by which “order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished” . . . .
It reminds us of the extent to which infrastructures are earned and re-earned on an ongoing, often daily, basis. It also reminds us (modernist obsessions notwithstanding) that staying power, and not just change, demands explanation. Even if we ignore this fact and the work that it indexes when we talk about infrastructure, the work nonetheless goes on. Where it does not, the ineluctable pull of decay and decline sets in and infrastructures enter the long or short spiral into entropy that—if untended—is their natural fate.
Jackson, S. (2015) Repair. Theorizing the contemporary: The infrastructure toolbox. Cultural Anthropology website. Available at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/repair
The recognition that these systems have to be managed–a part of which is repair and maintenance–in order to operate is welcome. Not only is the observed one of a better-than-expected operation (beyond design and technology) because of repair and maintenance. It is also because real-time system operators have to actively manage in order to preclude or otherwise avoid major events or errors from happening.
What to my knowledge has not been pursued in the sociotechnical literature is that specific focus on repair, as the above author continues:
Attending to repair can also change how we approach questions of value and valuation as it pertains to the infrastructures around us. Repair reminds us that the loop between infrastructure, value, and meaning is never fully closed at points of design, but represents an ongoing and sometimes fragile accomplishment. While artifacts surely have politics (or can), those politics are rarely frozen at the moment of design, instead unfolding across the lifespan of the infrastructure in question: completed, tweaked, and sometimes transformed through repair. Thus, if there are values in design there are also values in repair—and good ethical and political reasons to attend not only to the birth of infrastructures, but also to their care and feeding over time.
That the values expressed through repair (others would say, “expressed as the practices of actual repair”) need to be understood as thoroughly as the practices of actual design reflects, I believe, a major research gap in the sociotechnical literature with which I am familiar.
4. Thinking infrastructurally about cognitive reversals in complex organizations
I
What else can we do, senior executives and company boards tell themselves, when our business is on the line? “We have to risk failure in order to succeed!”
But what if the business is one of the many critical infrastructures privately owned or managed Here, if upper management seeks to implement risk-taking changes, they rely on middle-level reliability professionals, who, when they take risks, do so in order to reduce the chances of systemwide failure. To reliability-seeking professionals, the risk-taking activities of their upper management look like a form of suicide for fear of death.
When professionals are compelled to reverse practices they know and find to be reliable, the results have been deadly:
• Famously in the Challenger accident, engineers had been required up to the day of that flight to show why the shuttle could launch; on that day, the decision rule was reversed to one showing why launch couldn’t take place.
• Once it was good bank practice to hold capital as a cushion against unexpected losses; capital security arrangements now mandate they hold capital against losses expected from their high-risk lending. Mortgage brokers traditionally made money on the performance and quality of mortgages they made; in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, their compensation changed to one based on the volume of loans originated but passed on.
• Originally, the Deepwater Horizon rig had been drilling an exploration well; that status changed when on April 15 2010 BP applied to the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) to convert the site to a production well. The MMS approved by the change. The explosion occurred five days later.
In brief, decision-rule reversals have led to system failures and more: NASA was never the same; we are still trying to get out of the 2008 financial mess and the Great Recession that followed; and the MMS disappeared from the face of the earth.
II
“But, that’s a strawman,” someone counters. “Of course, we wouldn’t deliberately push reliability professionals into unstudied conditions, if we could avoid it.”
Really?
The oft-recommended approach, Be-Prepared-for-All-Hazards, looks first like the counsel of wisdom. It however is dangerous if requiring emergency and related organizations to cooperate in ways they currently cannot, using information they will not have or cannot obtain, for all manner of interconnected scenarios, which if treated with equal seriousness, produce considerable modeling and analytic uncertainties, let alone manifest impracticalities.
5. Thinking infrastructurally about 9/11
You are on one of the upper floors of a huge skyscraper, looking out on the morning. That is Reality I: You are the observing subject looking out at reality. After a point, you realize that dot in the distance is actually a plane headed toward you, this morning in the World Trade Center. That is Reality II: You become the object of reality, in that grip of the real, and no longer observer only.
There is, nevertheless, Reality III. This is of the air traffic controllers during 9/11. Neither the observer of the first reality nor the object of second, the professionals achieved the unprecedented without incident that day. They were instructed to land all commercial and general aviation aircraft in the United States—some 4,500 aircraft—and did so.
Without overstretching the point, so too do we demand that professionals land those water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications, and many more critical services every day without major incident.
6. Thinking infrastructurally about finance
I
When it comes to electricity infrastructure, the drive to high reliability is driven by dread associated with loss of containment at a nuclear generator or islanding of the entire electric transmission grid. Large irreplaceable dams, whether upriver of settlement or not, are not to be overtopped.
Nuclear explosions occur, dams are overtopped, and grids do separate and island, but these events are rare–rare because of their management beyond technology and design–and when the events do happen they serve to reinforce their must-never-happen dread.
II
In contrast, financial services have “should-never-happen events”—bank runs should be avoided and financial crises shouldn’t happen. The standard of operating reliability is not one of precluding financial crises from ever happening, but rather of treating these crises (1) as avoidable though not always, or (2) as inevitable (“busts are part of market capitalism”) or at least (3) compensable after the fact (as in the pre-2008 assurance that it’s better to clean up after a financial bubble bursts than trying to manage it beforehand).
Not having reliability of financial services based on must-never-happen events has major consequences for standards of economic stability and growth.
III
At the macro level, there are two different standards of economic reliability: The retrospective standard holds the economy is performing reliably when there have been no major shocks or disruptions from then to now. The prospective standard holds the economy is reliable only until the next major shock.
Why does the difference matter? In practical terms, the economy is prospectively only as reliable as its critical infrastructures are reliable, right now when it matters for economic productivity. Indeed, if economy and productivity were equated only with recognizing and capitalizing on retrospective patterns and trends, economic policymakers and managers could never be reliable prospectively.
IV
For example, a retrospective orientation to where we are today is to examine economic and financial patterns and trends since, say, 2008; a prospective standard would be to ensure that–at a minimum–the 2008 financial recovery could be replicated, if not bettered, for the next global financial crisis.
The problem with the latter–do no worse in the financial services sector than what happened in the last (2008) crisis–is that benchmark would have to reflect a must-never-happen event for the sector going forward.
What, though, are the chances it would be the first-ever must-never-happen event among all of that sectors’ should-never-happen ones?
7. Thinking infrastructurally about “efficiency versus equality“
I
A good deal has been written arguing that economic efficiency and equality in economic well-being can move in the same direction (e.g., healthier people are more economically productive). The dominant view, nevertheless, remains The Big Tradeoff: more equality means less efficiency, all else constant.
This is altogether curious from the perspective of policy analysis and public management: Why would anyone take a movement in efficiency (or equality) to be caused by a movement in the other rather than caused by some intervening variable affecting both efficiency and equality independently?
II
More institutionally-informed economists say they do talk about intervening variables, at least in the form of secure property rights that underpin gains in economic efficiency. Yet those are no more than second-order considerations. For when economists talk about the necessity of “secure property rights,” they rarely see any need to underscore a hugely reliable contract law, insurance and title registration infrastructure in place and “always on.”
Could it be, for example, that consumption is less unequally distributed than income precisely because critical infrastructures have been more reliable in the delivery and distribution of goods and services than they have been in the creation and generation of income opportunities for those doing the consuming?
8. Thinking infrastructurally about societal dread
Although not first thought of as such, critical infrastructures are a key institutional mechanism for the distinguishing and dispersing social values with respect to societal dread and fear.
Critical infrastructures instantiate social values not abstractly but as differences taken into account when societal reliability and safety matter now. These differences—more properly, differentiated knowledge bases about and orientations to reliability and safety at the event and system levels—are reconciled by infrastructure control rooms (where they exist) in real time and in the name of ensuring high reliability (including safety), then and there.
I
Trust is a good example of how a social value related to dread and fear is specified and differentiated by infrastructures. Broader discussions about “trust requires shared values” miss the fact that team situation awareness of systemwide reliability operators is much more about knowledge management, distributed cognition, and keeping a shared bubble of system understanding than it is about “trust” as a singularly important social value.
For that matter, distrust is as core as trust. One reason operators are reliable is that they actively distrust the future will be stable or reliable in the absence of the system’s vigilant real-time management. There has been much less discussion of the positive function of distrust as a social value. In contrast, “distrust” often takes the adjective, “polarizing.”
II
So too for “dread and fear” Widespread social dread–as in the societal dread that drives the reliability management of very hazardous infrastructures–is almost always taken to be negative. Here, though, dread also has a positive function.
Every day, nuclear plant explosions, airline crashes, financial meltdowns, massive water-supply collapse—and more—are avoided that would have happened had not operators and managers in these large systems prevented their occurrence.
Why? Because societal dread is so intense that these events must be precluded from happening on an active basis. (It might be better to say that we don’t altogether know “societal dread” unless we observe how knowledgeable professionals operate and manage complex critical infrastructures.)
There is such fear of what would happen if large interconnected electricity, telecommunications, water, transportation, financial services and like did fail that it is better to manage them than not have them.
III
All of us of course must wonder at the perversity of this. But that is the function of this dread, and distrust for that matter, isn’t it? Namely: to push us further in probing what it means to privilege social and individual reliability and safety over other values and desires. We are meant to ask: What would it look like in world where such reliability and safety are not so privileged?
For the answer to that question is manifestly evident: Most of the planet already lives in that world of unreliability and little safety. We’re meant to ask, precisely because the answer is that clear.
9. Thinking infrastructurally about crisis leadership
When it comes to occasions where leadership matters as in crises, the literature is typically top-down (leaders direct) or bottom-up (self-organizing crisis response), where networks are largely described as vertical (hierarchical) or horizontal (laterally interacting leaders, official and unofficial).
A third category should be added: infrastructure control rooms, and not just in terms of Incident Command Centers during the emergency but already-existing large-system control centers whose staff continue to operate during the emergency.
Paul Schulman and I argue infrastructure control rooms are a unique organizational formation meriting society protection, even during (especially during) turbulence in their task environments. They have evolved to take hard systemwide decisions under difficult conditions that require a decision, now. Adding this third category is to insist on real-time large-system management as the prevention of major failures and thus crises that would have happened had not control room managers, operators and support staff prevented them.
More, a major reason for this high reliability management in a large sociotechnical system is to ensure that when errors do happen, they are less likely to be because of this management than to have been forced by other factors, particularly exogenous shocks. Infrastructure management for systemwide reliability and safety seeks to isolate the field of blame and root causes, not least of which relate to “leadership errors.”
10. Thinking infrastructurally about generative AI
A joint statement has been issued by the Center for AI Safety: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Famously, this single sentence was signed by more than 350 AI experts and public figures. Now, of course, we cannot nor should we dismiss the actual and potential harms of the artificial intelligence scenarios they have in mind.
But, just as clearly, these 350 people must be among the last people on Earth you’d turn to for pandemic and nuclear war scenarios of sufficient infrastructure granularity against which to appraise their AI crisis scenarios.
11. Thinking infrastructurally about self-organizing in emergencies
I
Those who study major earthquakes, tsunamis, or other place-based catastrophes often remark about how remaining populations self-organize immediately afterwards by way of saving lives and providing what relief they can on their own.
What is less recognized, I believe, is the institutional niche (if any) that critical infrastructures hold in disaster locations and situations.
II
In some cases, the self-organization takes place because there is little government presence, infrastructural or otherwise, beforehand let alone as the disaster unfolds. If there is electricity or tap water beforehand, it is intermittent. Hospitals remain few or too far. In these situations, the only thing between you and death is yourselves. One thinks of the media attention given to earthquakes in low- and middle-income countries.
Self-organization, however, is also observed in disaster situations that destroy longstanding critical infrastructures in high income countries. Increased lateral communication and improvisational behavior are also witnessed among relief works, front-line infrastructure staff and emergency managers,
I want to suggest that self-organization in these latter situations differs in at least one catalytic respect.
A major part of that self-organization of field crews and the public is to provide initial restoration of some kind of electricity, water, road, communications and other so-called lifeline services, like medical care. Indeed, what better acknowledgement of society’s major institutional niche for interconnected critical infrastructures than the immediate emergency response of restoring the backbone infrastructures of electricity, water, telecoms and roads.
III
So what?
Two photographs show people organizing themselves to remove the rubble outside. If I’m right, the function served in each could differ significantly, depending on role that reliable critical infrastructures have had there up to the disaster. It’s important to know that this picture, and not that one, is of removing rubble from the only road to the water treatment plant, for example.
Why, again, is that important?
These days we’re told it’s important to dismantle capitalism. Well, major disasters are frequently dismantling infrastructures, thin or thick on the ground, and infrastructures are always treated as part of capitalism writ large and modernities writ small. If capitalism has colonized crisis into every nook and cranny of the world, it’s hardly useful then in explaining the presence or absence of the institutional niche just mentioned. You’re better advised to look to complex adaptive systems theory, rather than power theories, for insights into real-time responses and their immediate aftermath.
For more on the limitations of theories of power (direct, indirect, dispersed), please see Part III of When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene). See also section II.28 of the Guide discussing other examples of “thinking infrastructurally”.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 